


open up my eager eyes

by publictransit



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Gen, M/M, eventually additional losers, the mortifying ordeal of being twenty something and returning to your hometown, the town of Derry as a character, the year 2004 as a character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-10-20 18:05:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20679641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/publictransit/pseuds/publictransit
Summary: Eddie sees the poster, ugly mustard yellow and maroon and Andy Warhol contrasts, advertising a comedy hour. Eddie sees the poster and a time and a date and a name: Richie Tozier. Eddie sees the poster, and doesn’t even think about how nasty the wall on the subway platform is, using it to brace himself while he pukes.—For some reason, Eddie buys a ticket to Richie Tozier’s show.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Eddie and Richie remember. It's unfortunate except for when it's not.

Eddie sees the poster and feels abruptly winded.

_An asthma attack_, he thinks. _I’m having an asthma attack_.

He remembers, somewhat shapelessly, the dull, fluorescent pharmacy. He used to power through an inhaler a week when he was a kid. It’s been long enough since he’s used one regularly that it’s almost — well. It’s almost like he forgot.

Eddie sees the poster, ugly mustard yellow and maroon and Andy Warhol contrasts, advertising a comedy hour. Eddie sees the poster and a time and a date and a name: Richie Tozier. Eddie sees the poster, and doesn’t even think about how nasty the wall on the subway platform is, using it to brace himself while he pukes.

—

For some reason, Eddie buys a ticket to Richie Tozier’s show.

He’s never seen a comedian live. He imagined it was the kind of thing you got dragged too by your friends from improv club. Or maybe some dude in your philosophy class. Or maybe by the other freshman who lived on your floor in residence.

Eddie had studied actuarial accounting and never, ever entered an undergraduate residence building.

He’s never been a member of a club, either, but that doesn’t feel quite true. He’s never been in a campus club, then. He knows that much. 

It’s been as many years as he has finger on his right hand since he graduated from NYU, and he was closer to thirty than anything else, and he was getting close to having enough money to put a down payment on a very plain, square studio condo with a half kitchen and a full bath, and — and he was going to see a stand-up comedian for the first time in his life.

All because he’d… thrown up in public?

_Not good, Kaspbrak_, he thinks. _This is probably very not good._

He has enough sense to realize this, but not enough sense to stop himself from going anyway. 

—

Further, because he’s never been to a comedy club, he shows up promptly twenty minutes before doors and spends at least a full hour nursing a vodka soda in the second row, farthest seat to left, well before anyone takes the stage.

The two comedians who talk each for twenty minutes in quick succession once the show begins properly are… not _not_ funny.

Eddie is waiting for something. Eddie can feel himself waiting for something, but he doesn’t know what the something is that he’s waiting for, and that’s making him anxious, if he wouldn’t describe the waiting for something itself as an anxiety, which he would. Probably.

“Ladies, gentlemen, especially ladies, please put your hands together for the Richie Tozier!”

Eddie feels like someone has kicked him in the chest. Actually, like he actually feels like he got kicked in the chest.

Why the fuck does Eddie suddenly know what it feels like to get kicked in the chest?

Not abstract, not metaphorical, he literally feels his skin tingle and sting, and his diaphragm stutters, hard, and he coughs once, twice, a harsh and bright cough that catches the back of his throat, raw. He feels raw, raw all over, vulnerable. Small. He feels small.

“How are you losers doing?” Richie Tozier asks into the microphone, shielding his eyes from the spotlight with a raised hand. Holy shit, Eddie is going to puke.

Again.

Richie Tozier is tall and wiry, with wide hands and a shit-eating grin and glasses that have, against any sane person's better judgement, come back into fashion.

Eddie’s going to puke again, why the fuck—

“I’ve spent this entire week listening to that song, Mr. Brightside, you know it? You know it, it’s fuckin’ everywhere. I’m not sure I like it, but I’ve been thinking about the band that wrote it a lot — they’re kind of like, The Strokes, but for people who got horny in Sunday school. Yeah, they’re called The Killers—”

_Now I’m gonna have to kill this fuckin’ clown. _

Eddie stands, straight the fuck up panicking, knocking the chair into the knees of the woman sitting behind him. She curses, loudly enough that it draws the ire of some of the crowd around them. Richie, it’s fucking Richie Tozier, and Eddie forgot — properly, really forgot, not just some random asshole from the town he grew up in, but the most important asshole in his life, and it’s been — ten years?

It’s been ten years since he last saw Richie Tozier, and Eddie can remember now, that he’d cried when Richie left town. Not like, shed a cinematic, masculine tear. He’d really fucking cried.

Richie had gotten into UCLA and Eddie had gotten into NYU and neither had told the other or anyone else that they’d sent solitary applications to faraway schools and hoped quietly that they’d have somewhere to go when they left their town behind. Eddie already had his acceptance letter to NYU when Richie told him about UCLA, and equally as hurt and hypocritical, had more or less completely snapped. _You should have told me_, he remembers, _why didn’t you tell m_e.

Probably the same reason he hadn’t told Richie about New York — just in case. Just in case of _what_, he’d never quite put his finger on, but just in case, nonetheless.

Richie had packed up his Mom’s old car — his, now, a graduation present — and Eddie had gotten a flight out of Portland, Maine and never visited town again.

The town — Derry.

Richie _fucking_ Tozier.

“Someone had a little too much fun with the opening acts,” Richie says, and the crowd laughs.

_Fuck you, Trashmouth_, Eddie thinks. Then:

“Fuck you, Trashmouth,” he says. The crowd laughs equally as loudly at his heckle, but with visceral discomfort.

“Trashmouth?” Richie snorts. “Are you thirteen?”

Eddie didn’t remember: Richie doesn’t remember.

—

Here’s the thing: Eddie doesn’t understand how the fuck he forgot an entire person.

Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome? Hyperthymesia? Frontotemporal dementia?

Amnesia — amnesia of some kind, certainly.

Now that he’s thinking about it, he can’t stop thinking about it, and he’s remembering Richie, and Derry, their little sepia town in Maine, and Stan Uris bringing over puzzles to build on Eddie’s Clorox-soaked dining table when he was too sick to go out to play, and breaking his arm — Richie setting the bone and fucking it up even worse than it was already — and Bill Denbrough getting through a whole soliloquy in Hamlet in Junior English without stuttering once — Richie interrupting the play entirely to whoop and promptly getting asked to leave their classroom — and Bev Marsh putting away her cigarettes, considerate — and Richie hid the fact that he smoked from Eddie entirely for almost five months, simply because he refused to do it when he knew Eddie would be so much as in the room with him — and holy fuck, _Richie._

Richie’s glasses, perpetually smudged. Richie’s ninth grade growth spurt — his jeans always an inch too short at the ankles, for a whole year and then some. Richie streaking a homecoming. Richie learning to play a hamstrung little guitar from the secondhand store on Main Street. Richie refusing to give anyone else a turn in the hammock.

Richie shouting his name — _look at me, Eddie, don’t look at it, please, look at me_.

Eddie, who pretty quickly noticed that there were insufficient exits in the mostly underground comedy bar, waits just beyond what he figures must be the stage door.

He listens, while he remembers. The crowd laughs, and laughs, and applauds, once, and then twice.

Encore, Richie Tozier. Encore.

When the stage door does open, he watches as Richie recognizes him from the heckle, earlier in the show — nothing more, nothing less.

“Please tell me you’re not going to try and fight me for your dignity, here, dude, you’re like, fun sized,”

“Beep beep, Richie,” Eddie says, a little desperate.

He watches as Richie recognizes him.

Richie recognizes him, and promptly pukes. 

_Well_, Eddie thinks. _He won’t be able to make fun of me for that part, at least. _


	2. two.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I need a drink.”
> 
> “You need a toothbrush,” Eddie says.
> 
> “Drinks. I need plural — drinks,” Richie says, with conviction.

This could be going better.

Objectively, Eddie thinks, any situation where he becomes responsible for trying to keep someone upset from escalating to having-a-full-blown-fucking-panic-attack could be going better. Maybe this is why he’s always been the one to do the panicking — it does make things simpler.

“Eddie, holy shit,” he says, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

“I threw up too,” Eddie says, sort of aggressively torn between wanting to try and comfort Richie and really not wanting to touch Richie while he’s still probably got backsplash-vomit all spattered on his clothes and skin from where it hit the wall.

“Oh my god, what the fuck.”

“I thought I was going crazy.”

“Eds,” Richie says, serious, meeting Eddie’s eyes and holy shit, Richie got tall. He’s both taller and more broad than the Richie of Eddie’s memory — the Richie that Eddie just remembered, like, two hours ago, but remembers now_ forcefully_ — and he’s standing close enough that Eddie can smell cigarettes and Old Spice deodorant doing double-duty between the stage lights and the near panic. “You are crazy.”

“Fuck you, dude — and don’t call me Eds,” Eddie replies, thoughtless, a reflex he didn’t know he had. Richie suddenly looks like he’s going to be sick again. “What’s — what’s new?” Eddie tries, weakly.

“_What’s new_?” Richie repeats, condescending.

“I asked you first,” Eddie responds, deliberately obtuse.

“Christ,” Richie says, running both hands down his mostly-cleaned face. “I need a drink.”

“You need a toothbrush,” Eddie says.

“Drinks. I need plural — _drinks_,” Richie says, with conviction. 

“Do you remember,” Eddie starts, stops, worried. What if Richie doesn’t remember, not all the way, not the way that Eddie is remembering. He asks anyway. “Do you remember the whiskey that Bill got out of his parents’ liquor cabinet when we were in tenth grade? Spring break, right?”

Waking up on the dirt floor of the clubhouse. Bill and Ben asleep under the New Kids on the Block poster in one corner, Stan starfished and face down in the middle of the room, Richie and Eddie pretzeled together, using the broken hammock as a makeshift blanket.

“Yeah,” Richie says, his smile a little miserable. “The first round’s on me. Anything that isn’t whiskey. I just remembered that I’ve hated it since I was fifteen.”

—

They get vodka and drink it from the paper cups stashed by the bathroom sink in Richie’s hotel room, sit cross-legged on the massive bed with Richie’s inordinately sleek laptop computer between them, and they google Bill, first.

“Oh shit,” Eddie says, meaning it. “Bill’s famous.”

“Bill’s a little famous.”

“Still famous.”

“I’m a little famous,”

“No, you aren’t.”

“Yeah, I am,” Richie says. “You literally saw my name on a poster.”

Eddie has the beginning of a barb ready and waiting, but takes stock. They’ve gone back to Richie’s hotel room — the hotel room in New York City, more than covered by the paycheck from his show tonight. The hotel room is idly expensive and oddly spare, with windows that gape and make Eddie feel almost seasick to look through. It’s late — later than Eddie should be up, or maybe just later than he’s used to. He hasn’t had anything — anyone — keeping him up in a while.

Richie is a little famous: Eddie is not, and doesn’t really want to talk about it.

“Search up Bev, now.”

Bev, unsmiling and stern. Net worth: 12 million USD.

More than a little famous.

Nothing for Stan, nothing for Mike. There’s a small description of a Ben Hanscom on the site for an architectural firm with a fashionable website, saying that he specializes in mixed-use spaces and graduated top of his class at MIT.

“So, Ben’s not famous,” Eddie says.

“I mean,” Richie says. “Give him another couple years, maybe he’ll build the next Chrysler building. Or a McDonald’s where you can dine in the arches.”

“Fuck off.”

“I think on the sliding scale of famous to definitely-not-famous, Ben still places firmly above you.”

“I don’t want to be famous,”

“What is it that you want to do when you grow up, Spaghetti?” Richie says. “Seeing as you’ve still got at least three inches to go.”

“I’ll show you three inches—“

“You did not just say that,” Richie guffaws.

“Can you shut the fuck up?”

“Not really, I thought you’d’ve remembered that part by now.”

The thing is, Eddie does remember.

He remembers at least as much as he doesn’t. There’s something sitting on the barest edge, though, like a peddle in his shoe that only catches the skin every so often. He can’t find the peddle, but he can feel the blister.

Richie is warm and close and so fucking loud and Eddie is struck again by how the precise fuck he forgot.

“Richie, why’d I forget you?” Eddie asks, a little quieter than he means to be. Richie’s mouth gets all small and pinched, like thinking about it costs him something.

“I’m not sure,” Richie says. “Why’d I forget you back?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie replies, and wonders if that’s where they can stop this. Eddie and Richie.

But then: Eddie hasn’t let Richie go farther than the adjoining bathroom since the alleyway earlier, and figures there’s probably a reason for that, even if he doesn’t know precisely what that reason is.

“W’need to go back,” Richie says.

“Where?”

“To the future, dipshit, where do you think?” Richie says, and Eddie slaps him in the chest. “Derry. We gotta go back to Derry. Promise.”

“I don’t—” Eddie starts. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“I don’t know either, that’s why we need to go,” Richie says, and now he’s holding up a pinky finger. “Promise.”

“As long as it’s just a pinky promise,” Eddie mumbles, not really knowing why he mumbles it. Richie’s got big hands. Christ. Eddie’s hand hurts, an ache that he always seems to forget when it isn’t happening. Carpal tunnel, maybe, but he’d always just wondered — which itself should’ve stood out to him, maybe. He’s gone to a doctor for everything else, and then some.

He’d usually just glare at the scar there until the ache faded and get on with his day. 

Tonight, Eddie loops his smallest finger together with Richie’s.

He’s pretty sure he remembers to let go.

**Author's Note:**

> on tumblr @ikeashowroom
> 
> this might get a little sequel! one day~


End file.
